The Faulty Deletion or In Which Mycroft's Apology is 16 Years Overdue
by thefloatingpoem
Summary: Sherlock has retired to Sussex, alone. He is melancholy, but content, pottering about his garden, keeping his bees. Sherlock tries not to think of John, who has married a normal person this time and should be living quite happily in the suburbs. As it turns out, John is not living quite happily. And Mycroft owes them both an apology.


He shakes his head at the crossword puzzle. Of course he is still able to solve it without even writing anything down. But how slowly it goes! How doggedly must he tear away at the muzzening, muffling cloth of old age that seems to limit his access to his mind! He folds the crossword gently and bins it with a soft _whump_.

Occasionally someone will still send him a conundrum. He applies himself to these puzzles with ferocious joy and still more ferocious hunger. He feels he cannot let himself stagnate. He must prove to himself and the world that although his hair is streaked through with silver, and although he has retired to live a quiet life of gardening and beekeeping in Sussex, he is still the great mind, the world's only consulting detective. He is desperate to hide what he sees as the infirmity of old age creeping up on him.

But he no longer feels the unbearable latent ennui of his younger days. He no longer yearns for the puzzles. He remembers the desperate, leashed feeling that would come upon him between cases, the nihilistic dismissal of his mental gifts, the empty yet overfull feeling he once experienced as his brain began to pick itself apart. He remembers this feeling, has scores of notes written about it in his journals, yet he finds himself puzzling over it, struggling to sympathize with his former self. Can it really be that he is the same person who not long ago shot at the walls and tore suits to shreds and experimented in ever-viler ways with his own body out of boredom, the sheer desire for destruction, and the raw need for mental stimulation? There was once a time when leisure was simply a synonym for slow maddening, for despair. That pattern of devastating boredom interspersed with devastating brilliance had once been an integral part of him. What happened?

He sits in his chair thinking, feeling slow and dull and ordinary. He is not so old as to be experiencing some kind of neurodegenerative disease, he assures himself. It is statistically unlikely. After all, he's only 59. Yet the change in his personality is hugely glaring. And that old desire to self-destruct has all but vanished.

He has nothing planned for today, other than watering the garden and picking tomatoes. He should leave the bees alone for a few days and let them do their work. He frowns.

This leisure should bother him profoundly. It should cause him to question the point of living. It should cause him to consider all sorts of terrible things. He is not above admitting that he used to plan murders, the most ingenious murders he could think of, and my but could he certainly think up the most brilliant plans, beautiful plans, foolproof, watertight plans. But the thought of all of the investigations, the questions, the crying relatives, the many sickly-smelling flowers—it would all be too much. He hated the pomp and circumstance of death, the wailing, the crying, the carrying on. And John wouldn't like it, if Sherlock planned a murder. Not that he would ever find out. Sherlock used to scowl, then, and turn his furious, uncontrollable thoughts upon himself, planning by turns the most beautiful drama or the most hidden secret of a suicide. He planned suicides like an artist writes poetry. But he never carried them out to fruition. He would think of John. _Ah, John_, he would think. _I could not do that to him again._

Now, with little to do, he finds that when he looks inside himself, he is placid. Content. As unperturbed as the smooth surface of a still lake. He contemplates pottering about among the leaves of tomato and zucchini plants, taking in the scent of the sun-warmed earth, or fresh basil and the lavender that grows on the hill. He contemplates collecting plump little cherry tomatoes and shiny, fat bell peppers, and long, thin snips of chive. He contemplates a small summer lunch for one. He contemplates watching the clouds go by from the terrace. He contemplates a short nap in his sunlit room, and then an evening sitting on his porch and reading. All this pleases him, when by all rights it should infuriate him. His face puckers. There is nothing for it. He is losing his mental prowess. He is becoming ordinary.

At that he thinks of John. Stolid, ordinary, perfect, brilliant John. The slight ache in his chest that he feels when he thinks of John has dulled over time. How he can possibly have a physical ache there when the conceit of 'heartache' is undoubtedly medically suspect, he is not sure. But the fact remains: When he thinks of John he feels a low pain just at the place where his heart beats. He indulges himself for a few minutes, focusing on that very slight ache. Leaving Sherlock was the only selfish act John had ever committed. Every day, Sherlock forgives John a little more. Anger requires energy. Sometimes it is easier to forgive someone you miss desperately, someone you never see.

Perhaps it is the lack of John that is dulling the fine edge of Sherlock's mind. Brilliance does love an audience, pines and wastes away in the lack thereof. Brilliance loves especially an educated audience. A smart audience. An enlightened audience. John was all of these things. Sherlock sighs and puts his memories of John away again, locks them up in a chest of pine, tucks them away in a far and dusty corner. The chest itself is never very dusty. It gets far too much use.

The smart of pain fades as Sherlock turns his mind to other things. Perhaps this evening he will play some Brahms on the violin. There is a young woman in the village who plays the piano and is fairly tolerable. Sherlock has been sending her anonymous cash in the mail because he can. And because he deduced upon their first meeting that her hopes to go to Conservatory were dashed by her inability to pay and by the debilitating illness of a close relative—a brother? A parent? That he is unsure is a source of discomfort for him. In earlier days he would have known, surely? He thinks John would like it, giving money anonymously to someone who needs it. He also thinks he's gone soft in his old age, in more ways than one.

Occasionally Sherlock will invite her to play a sonata or two with him. Amy and Sherlock have little in common other than music. They have spirited discussions about aesthetics and the nature of taste and then part amicably and think no more of each other. Neither of them would have it any other way. Perhaps he will give her a ring and see if she's free.

Sherlock doesn't often revisit his case notes, but that afternoon, he is agitated. He reads as though his life depends on it. And it does. There is a deduction that he has forgotten. An important one. A life changing one. But what is it? The mind palace records fail him—it is a file he purposefully corrupted or deleted then, a secret he is keeping from himself—so he turns to the scads and scads of papers that usually sit so quiet and neat on the bookshelves. He is a madman, throwing paper left and right, creating a maelstrom of white and cream, strewing everywhere the papers that he will have to clean and organize later. He does not even pause to think about the mess he is making, wading through the case files from October 2011 to reach the box labeled November/December. These case notes (journals, really, if he is honest with himself) are full of John. His mind is full of John. John calling him amazing as though it were obvious. John staring. John adoring. John at the side of his hospital bed after he got shot. John smiling. John at his wedding to Mary. Sherlock's heart thumps wildly and the fire of ache that he thought had dulled over time roars into new life.

He stops suddenly, precious page in hand. He reads. Paper settles around him like snow falling softly to the ground.

_December 14, 2019. John is divorced. Mary Morstan is assuming yet another false identity in South Africa. It seemed that things could go back to normal, back to the way they were, back to good. I want that more than anything. But I asked John yesterday if he would move back to Baker Street. And he refused. He always surprises me, but I thought he had at least lost the ability to disappoint me when he married. _

_He said he wanted to start a new chapter in his life, put all this behind him, forget all of it. I told him wherever he could think to go, I could find him, that I wouldn't let him forget me, that his mind wouldn't let him forget me, that it would replay scenes of our life together like a film on loop for his subconscious. A bit rash and not good? _

_He didn't react well. He said that if he could get over the war, he could get over this._

_I couldn't stop the words as they came out. I was outside of myself. I told him his PTSD nightmares showed that he wasn't over the war. I told him that he wouldn't be able to forget me. That I would appear in his dreams. _

_And he said, "Sherlock, you are supposed to be convincing me to stay, not giving me extra ammunition. Suggesting I will have PTSD over you is suggesting that you're a trauma." And he left. He's gone. I've ruined everything._

The memory comes rushing back as though it were never deleted. Ghost files on his hard drive. Delete the source all you want. The ghost files will always remain, hidden away until they're needed again to fill in the gaps in the memory.

Sherlock is powerless to stop the images flashing before him. He hears John's broken voice again, hears him cracking under the strain. He sees John's changing eyes, their colour that defies categorization, he sees the dark circles beneath them. He wills himself to look closer and gasps, his breath harsh and loud in this stillness of his Sussex home. He sees tears filling those ambiguous glaucous eyes. He hears them colouring John's voice, hears the soft slight edge of pleading in the sound. How could he have forgotten John crying? How could he have forgotten what it meant? How could he have forgotten those words, "_Sherlock, you are supposed to be convincing me to stay…"_

Sherlock sits down, woozy, heedless of the crunch and crinkle of paper beneath him. He clutches the arms of his chair as if they are all that is mooring him to the ground, as if without them he will float away into the blue beyond, never to return. "He loved me," he says numbly to himself. "He wanted to stay." That was the deduction he chose to forget. And what a deduction to forget. It comes back to him in a hot flood, leaving him feeling sticky and breathless and sick. This was the only thing he ever deleted about John—that John loved him, that he wanted to make a life together as well, that he could only make that leap if he knew his love would be returned.

He deleted it because he believed it to be for the best at the time, because he couldn't live knowing that John loved him and left him anyway, because he believed John deserved a fresh start, because he believed John would be better off without him, because he feared never being good enough for John Watson, and perhaps most tragically, because some part of him was not entirely convinced that he was reading the signs correctly. That insidious internal voice opined that tears were hardly proof of love, that the physical gravity between their two bodies could be all imagined, that the tender electric accidental touches might be entirely innocent, that he was making too much of the softness in John's eyes. And at the same time, the same part of him whispered, "If John Watson is broken, it's because you broke him. If John Watson is crying, it's because you made him cry." It was not difficult for Sherlock to convince himself that he was a toxic presence in John's life. After all, he had always been dangerous. It was simultaneously his one great fault and his one redeeming grace. Until now. Now Sherlock leads the life of a solitary monk, a gentle and quiet life of gardening and beekeeping in the country.

Sherlock realizes he has stopped breathing. He labors to take in oxygen, to no avail. Is he having a panic attack? He idly wonders as his vision narrows and his hearing blurs. His last thoughts before he blacks out are, _I'm too old for this_, and, _At least I'm sitting down._

"Mr. Holmes?" Amy's voice weaves its way through the fog. "Mr. Holmes."

The command to speak doesn't make it from Sherlock's brain to his mouth at first. He sends it again and blinks as his system comes back on line. "Amy, isn't it," Sherlock manages, the words coming out slurred.

She lays a cool cloth on Sherlock's forehead. "Yes, it's me. I came over early with a slice of the cake I made using your honey from last season. Do you remember what happened?"

He looks balefully at her. "I fainted," he says. The derisive 'obviously' need not be said when his tone reeks so strongly of it.

Amy is accustomed to his supercilious ways and therefore utterly unperturbed. "It's 4 o' clock now. Do you remember when you fainted? Or why?"

"I stopped breathing. It hasn't been long. I'm fine," he intones like a recitation, irritably.

She doesn't take the bait. "Good," she says brightly. "Then we can play the Brahms in D minor." She smiles at his answering scowl. "There's a glass of water and a piece of cake for you there. You should consume them." She gathers up papers scattered around the room as Sherlock sips at his water. He takes a few bites of the cake as well and his body thanks him.

"You're an idiot, by the way," she says as blithely as though she were simply making polite conversation about the weather.

Sherlock looks sharply at her. "What do you mean?" he says, fixing her with a gimlet eye. She studiously ignores the eye (which Sherlock is reliably informed is icy enough to freeze a Siberian wolf) and bustles about cheerfully, running a dust cloth reverently over the baby grand and propping up the lid. She seats herself.

"You should tell him," she says.

Sherlock frowns deeply. "Tell whom what?"

She scoffs. "Don't play the innocent with me, Mr. Holmes. You know very well whom and what I am talking about."

Sherlock goes to his violin case and takes it out. "Play me an A," he says curtly. She plays the desired note and he tunes.

"He is probably just as miserable as you are," she says lightly, as though she were talking about throwing a garden party.

"I'm not miserable," replies Sherlock with equanimity.

"You weren't miserable yesterday," she says, "But today you are." She plays a few arpeggios to warm up and keeps talking. "I know you delete things. Like Gustav Holst's _The Planets_. I still can't fathom why you don't like that piece. And how you managed to delete it in its entirety." She stops playing and shuffles through her sheet music. "You deleted what's on that paper and today you found it and it forced you to remember."

Sherlock adjusts his music stand. "Sixteen years too late," he says simply, his voice quiet, his tone devoid of pain, his face neutral and plain. He readies himself to play and they begin.

Brahms is an excellent medium through which to experience pain, loss, love, joy, redemption, anger, despair. It has a wondrous cleansing facility. It excises demons. It clears the air. Sherlock pours everything he has ever felt into the sound. He wrings exquisite sounds, savage sounds, plaintive sounds, sounds like weeping and laughing and shouting, from his instrument, and Amy blazes along with him.

When they finish the final tragic, angry cadence, there is a silence, and then the sound of reverent clapping. Sherlock opens his eyes slowly, as though coming out of a deep sleep.

Crinkled at the edges, grey at the temples, a little paler, but still smiling. John. Sherlock drinks in the sixteen years' difference. "That was beautiful," John says finally. "Marvelous."

"You think so?" asks Sherlock, his face a mask of indifference, his tone blithe. For any but the most skilled of readers, he would seem completely unaffected by John's sudden reappearance. But the skilled reader might see the taut lines of his body, the tightness of his jaw, the strange and hard sheen in his eyes, the slight pinched quality of his voice suggesting a control very strenuously exerted. His phone pings. Sherlock tries to check it while also never taking eyes off of John. Amy is also watching John, so he can't be a hallucination or an apparition (unless of course Sherlock is also imagining Amy. Not outside the realm of possibility). He finally looks down.

_I believe I owe you an apology. You will find a document of interest in the top, left-hand drawer of your desk. –MH_

Sherlock walks slowly to the desk and opens the document. It's a transcript of a dialogue.

SH: He left me. Mary is gone and John hates her and still he _left _me.

MH: I told you not to get involved. Didn't you know it would end this way?

SH: He loves me.

MH: Then why has he left you?

SH: He doesn't think I can love him back.

MH: Is he wrong?

SH: …

MH: Silence speaks volumes, brother dear. Delete him.

SH: No. I won't delete him. I can't. I can't willingly unlearn all of the things he taught me. I'll lose _years_ of my life. It's madness.

MH: So is this, Sherlock. You're falling apart. Delete him and you will be as stable as you were before meeting him.

SH: I was miserable, Mycroft, surely you saw that.

MH: Not as miserable as you are now. Delete him.

SH: I will not!

MH: Fine. As you like. Suffer if you want to. You wanted my advice—

SH: [growls]

MH: Don't argue, you wanted my advice or you wouldn't have called. And my advice is to delete him. Or delete some of him.

(SH hangs up.)

Sherlock puts the document away with hands that shake. Another deleted event, returned in its full former mnemonic glory in an instant, restored in full color and in the mind palace to stay. Nothing so substantial is ever entirely deleted. This is a little fact that Sherlock never confessed to John.

John was always fascinated (and perhaps a little dismayed) by Sherlock's deletion process. The two of them would sit in silence, John typing, Sherlock thinking or pacing, and suddenly John would say unprompted, "But how can you delete it? If you try not to think of something, you will inevitably think of that thing. For instance if I said don't think of a pink elephant right now, you would think of a pink elephant. In fact the more you try not to think of the pink elephant, the more you think of the pink elephant. Right?"

Sherlock delighted in being enigmatic upon these occasions, replying loftily in a tone equal parts smug and aloof, "That's where you and I differ, John. It's all about control."

Perhaps John would have found it interesting to know that deletion was neither instantaneous, nor permanent, that it was occasionally faulty, that supposedly deleted memories sometimes came strolling out of the mind palace unwanted and unbidden and Sherlock was powerless to stop them. The process was actually this: When you come across a fact that you feel to be irrelevant, you cannot tell yourself not to think of it, for indeed, John was correct. The act of negating the fact calls your mind's attention to that fact. Instead, over a long period of time, you must simply let the pathway between your awareness and that fact fade, you must repeatedly think of something else entirely. So in order to forget the pink elephant, you must think of something completely unrelated, like 243 types of tobacco ash, or 564 soil samples of differing London terrain. He would never admit his process to John—it is an ugly process, inefficient, prone to errors, slow, clumsy, ungainly, and frankly, anyone who set their mind to it could do it. In fact, everyone does it, daily. It is only that Sherlock controls what is lost and what stays. Where other people might forget facts at random due to disuse (for instance, John counted the number of stairs leading up to 221B when he first appraised the flat, grimly wondering if it was at all advisable to live up a flight of stairs when he had a limp. When the limp miraculously went away, he forgot about the number of stairs entirely), Sherlock takes control of the natural deletion process, deleting and storing facts consciously rather than unconsciously.

Even with Sherlock's many years of bending his great mind to his greater will, it was a miracle that Sherlock had managed to forget that one crucial aspect of John leaving him. He has always found it singularly difficult to forget facts about John (other than his girlfriends, whom he deleted with delighted malice). He has never wanted to delete anything about John.

Realizing once that his mind was becoming ever more cluttered with facts about John (how he takes his tea and coffee, what he eats each morning for breakfast, what he likes to drink and when, the wrinkles of his face, the changing colors of his eyes), Sherlock panicked and attempted an experiment. He tried to delete his knowledge of John's masturbatory routine (Is he to be blamed if there was a ventilation shaft leading directly to John's room, and if he could position himself just so at the corresponding vent in the bathroom and easily hear all that went on upstairs? Can it really be considered a violation of privacy if that pipeline of auditory information was so damnably accessible? Who could resist such a temptation?)

The experiment was a categorical failure. He was utterly unable to delete it, any of it, even when given many months for the process.

So it was an act of sheer will that Sherlock forgot this one crucial deduction about his last meeting with John. If he believed that John left him in order to start anew and pursue happiness elsewhere, then he could live out his solitary years in a melancholy sort of contentment, keeping his bees and tending his garden and playing duets occasionally and solving the crossword puzzles just a little bit slower than he previously could. But if he knew that John loved him and left him thinking that Sherlock would never return the sentiment, he would never sleep again. He would tear himself apart. It was Mycroft's idea to delete the fact of John's existence. It was Sherlock's to delete the fact of John's love.

John watches Sherlock. His expression is impossible to read. Sherlock drinks it in like a man parched. "Mycroft phoned me," John says finally. He shuffles his feet. "As it turns out, he's had surveillance on me this whole time." John shakes his head minutely. He looks up and around for cameras with a dangerous look in his eye. "I hope you're listening, Mycroft." He turns his eye back to Sherlock. "The miserable bastard never _once_ told me. Not one word. And he never bloody deduced what was the matter with _my_ life, either, though it was clear as day to just about everyone I met." He addresses the hypothetical cameras again. "Not so clever as you think you are, Mycroft!"

"Told you what, John?" asks Sherlock softly.

John's angry bravado fades. "He never told me that you could love me. That you did love me. Perhaps he didn't believe it."

Sherlock froze. "And what _was_ the matter with your life, John? You opened a new chapter. Away from," he gestures vaguely and deprecatingly at himself and all that he entails, "This. Away from sociopaths. Away from me. You should have been happy."

John gives him a look. It's the 'we both know what's really going on here' look. Sherlock realizes suddenly why John didn't like it. "Are you still on about that? You aren't a sociopath. I know you aren't. You think it's convenient to tell people that, to somehow… _manage_ their expectations of you, but it's not true. Never has been, never will be," says John stoutly.

"You were supposed to be happy," says Sherlock brokenly, like a calculator with a syntax error, stuck on that thought.

John spreads his arms with a sparkle of challenge in his eyes. "Deduce me, Sherlock. I'm sure you'll learn all you need to know."

Sherlock hesitates. He doesn't want to disappoint John. Of course he can still do it. Of course he can. But he is afraid that he has lost his speed, his impressive way of rattling off personal facts, secrets, clues without even stopping to draw a breath. He has become slow. Old. Lonely. "You married again," he begins haltingly. It's easy to start there, with the physical tells a ring so generously leaves behind.

"Yes," says John, drawing out the one syllable word.

"And divorced again."

Sherlock stalks closer, still ever so slightly tentative, but taking it all in, breathing in details like they are air, relieved to not just be allowed to do so, but to be asked to do so. John appraises this new hesitation in his friend with interest and well-veiled concern, stowing the fact of it away for later analysis.

He examines John's shoes minutely. "You lived in the suburbs in a nice middle class neighborhood. You had a golden retriever. Her idea or yours, I wonder?" He frets. At one time, he would have known. He tries to keep his mind clear of panic as he straightens up again, hoping any redness in his face can be explained away by his crouch. But the panic comes back with every thump of his heart. _Back then, you would have known_, it beats. _Do better,_ it beats. _Try harder,_ it beats. "You haven't slept well for at least five years, probably longer. You stopped sharing her bed. She wanted to have children." His face screws up in confusion. "You… no longer… want… children?" he says, watching John for his reaction. He nods grimly. Sherlock feels so painfully slow and he wants so badly to impress John and if he can just be blindingly brilliant again, if he can just be quick and shining and wonderful again, maybe John will stay, and everything will change, change from content to happy, truly radiantly happy, and it's all so much, too much. He fights to breathe. _Second panic attack of my life in one day_, he thinks bleakly. _I really am losing my mind._

"Sherlock." John's concerned voice swims through the haze. "You are having a panic attack. I need you to breathe deeply. Everything's fine. I'm here." He calmly tells Amy, who has been sitting quietly in the next room, to fetch Sherlock a glass of cool water. John opens the window and gently leads Sherlock to the chair there. "Breathe, Sherlock. You're alright."

The smell of his lavender plants and of grass and earth and sun and of his tomato plants wafts in through the window. They cut through the chorus of rising voices, dull them down. He is in his home in Sussex. He is safe. There is the sound of the blue jay that lives in his backyard. He breathes deeply in and then out. His heartbeat slows. John is pressing a cool smooth glass of water into his hand. He drinks from it. Amy shows herself out with a nod to John, who wonders who the young woman is, but without any urgency. That's not important just now.

What's important is that John is holding Sherlock's hand now. It's wonderful, a warm anchor, keeping Sherlock from floating away or falling into himself. "You don't have to deduce me, Sherlock," murmurs John quietly, brushing his thumb against Sherlock's palm. "It was cowardly of me. I'll tell you."

He takes a deep breath of his own. Sherlock revels in that sound. He wants to crawl inside John's chest and listen to the soft, steady rhythm of his breathing forever. "I love you," says John. His eyes are completely earnest, fixed fast on Sherlock. And Sherlock is powerless to look away, couldn't do so even if he wanted to.

The next breath John takes is ever so shaky. "I loved you then. And I love you now. I thought… well Mycroft told me, long ago, after we dealt with Mary… He told me I should make a clean break of it. Said he'd known you longer than anyone." John looks down now. "Said I would get hurt. That it would be like Mary all over again, but worse because I'd feel all the more foolish for letting it happen to me again. He said." Here John clears his throat. "He said that I was good for you." His voice is laden with quiet emotion. "But that you were bad for me. He said that you would break me, that you always broke the things you had that were precious. That you couldn't love. That it wasn't in your mental make up."

The pressure of John's hand on Sherlock's increases in a squeeze. "And then when I told you I was leaving, I wanted you to stop me. I wanted you to say that I couldn't leave because you loved me. When you didn't stop me, I thought Mycroft was right."

Sherlock breathes shakily. "When did you change your mind?" His voice comes out as a croak, feels broken and unused.

"That's a good question." John fixes over-bright eyes on Sherlock's. "I was never really convinced of it. I always somehow thought that you would come after me. That I would wake up one day to you barging into my flat and throwing me my coat and taking me on another adventure. When I hit my lowest point I decided that I shouldn't wait around for you like a damsel in distress anymore. I should have come and found you then and there. But I still had bloody Mycroft in my head. So I went and found a woman to make a wife. She was all I would have wanted in another life. I had all I had ever wanted, supposedly. A small practice in the suburbs. A house. A dog. A wife. It all felt so meaningless and I didn't care about any of it. It was when she started pressing me about having children that I drew the line. And that's when I got divorced. And Mycroft phoned me not long after."

"What did he say?"

"In true Mycroftian style, he simply drawled, 'I may have been wrong about Sherlock.'" John looks equally amused and irritated, which seems to be a constant in his interactions with Mycroft. He shakes his head. "I should have come after you. Sod Mycroft. All the years I've wasted."

Sherlock clears his throat. "I would have come after you," he begins apologetically. "But I… I deleted it."

John becomes deadly still. "Deleted what?"

Sherlock clears his throat again, fidgets nervously in his seat. "I knew that you loved me. And I… deleted it." He braces himself for anger. John doesn't deliver.

John blinks. "You nutter. You utter bastard. How did you know I loved you?"

"You wanted me to convince you to stay. That's when I knew."

"And how did you manage to delete it? You never did give me a satisfactory explanation about that whole deletion trick."

Sherlock doesn't hesitate. He does not need to be mysterious for John, not now. "It's actually unbelievably simple, John. I never told you how simple… It just takes time. I lied by omission in my description of the process. Everyone can do it. Everyone does it, they're just not in control of it. It takes time. You practice thinking of something else instead of whatever you're endeavoring to delete until it becomes habit. You gave me sixteen years. It took six to bury the pathway between my consciousness and that fact. It took four more to bury it deep enough that I couldn't find it by digging for it. The last six years I've known that you left me, but not that you loved me. And today… I don't know what happened. Deletion is an inexact process, John. It's very messy. Today I… I just knew that I had forgotten a deduction, the most important deduction of my life. And I _had_ succeeded in deleting it from my mind palace, so digging there did no good, but I had it in my journal, and reading that conversation was enough to reinstate the memory in full, living color."

John is amazed. And a little bit angry. He can't seem to form words just yet.

"Mycroft wanted me to delete you. All of you." Sherlock is mumbling, staring at the white moulding on the wall as though it were incredibly riveting. "I didn't want to delete the best thing that had ever happened to me. I didn't want to go back to the way I was before." He clears his throat and tries to look up but only manages to move his gaze left, to John's feet. "You taught me so much. How could I willingly unlearn—"

He does not finish his sentence, because suddenly John's lips are soft and warm, firm, yet questioning, tentative, yet secure upon his own. John's fingertips are gentle on Sherlock's jaw. The kiss is everything it should be. It is a confession. It is an apology. It is a prayer. It is a hope. It is a question. John pulls away to gauge Sherlock's reaction.

Sherlock's answer is yes, yes, yes as he pulls John towards him again, and this time the kiss is a promise.

"Yes," says Sherlock, breaking away. "Forever."

"Yes," John agrees. "Forever." And this time when their mouths meet again, there is heat, John sucking at Sherlock's full lower lip, groaning when those lips part like the petals of a just-bloomed flower. John accepts the invitation of that languid parting, dips his tongue inside, swipes it along Sherlock's swollen lower lip, nips gently there. Sherlock is especially sensitive there, John marvels. John is trembling. Or Sherlock is trembling. John is not sure. John's hand pulls gently at the curls at the nape of Sherlock's neck and Sherlock pushes into the touch like a cat seeking affection.

John and Sherlock's phones ping in tandem.

_My congratulations. Are we to expect a happy announcement in the near future? –MH_

"So Big Brother-in-law _is_ watching, then. I'm still _very_ angry with you, Mycroft Holmes," says John to the room, clearly not knowing where to look, and clearly very annoyed at this fact.

Their phones ping again.

_Please remember that it is my interference that has brought about this fortuitous meeting. I only want what's best for you both. –MH_

"Yes, but it was you who drove us apart in the first place!" shouts John at the same time Sherlock cries, "Leave us alone, Mycroft!"

_Very well. I will downgrade your surveillance. With Dr. Watson around, Sherlock is much less likely to get into trouble anyway. –MH_

Sherlock grumbles something about dismantling cameras that no one hears because it is swallowed by John's fervent kiss and the complaint is immediately forgotten as they stumble their way to the bedroom, never stopping for air. And this time Mycroft actually does turn the surveillance off, because he wants nothing to do with the scene that is about to play out.

John and Sherlock discover each other again, in new ways, in beautiful ways. After all, sixteen years of separation have wrought changes upon each of them, changes that must be noted and understood and loved, until knowing those changes becomes a beautifully unbreakable habit. And even when they were together they did not know each other in this way—they did not know each other as lovers, they did not know the ins and outs of each other's bodies, they did not know each other's sighs and sensitivities and sensualities.

And they pledge to continue discovering each other, till death do them part.

John also pledges to eventually forgive his brother-in-law's sixteen-year-overdue apology, a point upon which Sherlock hems and haws. But he will acquiesce in time. After all, if it weren't for Mycroft, John wouldn't be here in Sherlock's arms.

_End_.

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:**

Thanks for reading! I have also posted on my AO3 account. Unbeta'd and unbritpicked, all errors are mine. My timeline might also be a little screwy? The Brahms piece I mentioned is the Violin Sonata in D min No. 3. I was thinking of the last movement in particular. This is a great performance of it:youtube dot com slash watch?v=eFFRAJP55f0

I am not 100% sure about my characterization of Sherlock here. My grandmother had a neurodegenerative disease in the last years of her life, and it sort of occurred to me how devastating it would be should Sherlock's mental prowess be compromised in any way. I originally began writing with the intention of exploring a lonely, elderly, and confused Sherlock, but it proved too hard for me and I decided to take the fic in a happier direction, but some elements of my original idea remain...

I have been thinking a lot about mental illness (as a person with depression, anxiety, and a fair handful of manic episodes to her name), and I am told that these things fade with age, that they lose their intensity, that humans mellow out. In fact, I'm personally counting on this being true, because everything is much harder when you feel so intensely. One of my great fears, however, is that if I feel less intensely, I will also think less intensely. My intensity is the main thing that drives my musical-compositional work. I began to think that perhaps even Sherlock's ups and downs might mellow out eventually, and that his need to solve puzzles might begin to change and become less pressing. I also imagine that losing one's intensity when one's intensity is so closely linked to one's mind might cause one to panic a bit (hence the panic attacks).

Admittedly, I'm not sure myself how convincing a job I've made of it. It's difficult to imagine how Sherlock might change over time. Let me know what you think, especially about the characterization, and whether you think it works or not.

Also used a made up word in the first paragraph. "Muzzening." Hate it? Love it? Don't care for it?

Thanks again for reading! You can reach out to me on Tumblr if you like! (thefloatingpoem dot tumblr dot com)


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